The Latest From The Front

The great victory for freedom and liberty (!) struck at the Bundy Ranch continues to resonate across the land like a 50-pound bag of manure dropped into a massive copper skillet. The latest insanity comes to us courtesy of The Blaze, the print version of the voices in Glenn Beck's head, which voices seem to be a bit horrifiedat the whole business.

Mack made the chilling revelation on Fox News' "The Real Story" Monday, two days after the tense standoff between Bundy and the federal government came to a peaceful end. "We were actually strategizing to put all the women up at the front," he said. "If they are going to start shooting, it's going to be women that are going to be televised all across the world getting shot by these rogue federal officers."

Mack obviously was inspired by the hundreds accounts of how the Minutemen hid behind their wives' skirts on Lexington Green and Concord Bridge, and of how the ladies of the Old North Church were arrayed in battle lines up on top of Breed's Hill in Charlestown. And surely I can't be the only one who noticed that Mack's account is remarkable devoid of comment from the actual women he says he was going to use as human shields. I'm sure this is an oversight.

Mack shot from obscurity to right-wing stardom in the mid-1990s when he challenged the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act and won a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court that weakened the law. For the past two years, he has zigzagged across the country spreading conspiracy theories about the federal government and promoting his organization as a "line in the sand" against government agents. Fox Business channel's Lou Dobbs Tonight gave Mack a platform to promote his views last night. Lou Dobbs, of course, is no stranger to controversy. Mack did not disappoint, telling Dobbs that in order to "save America", county sheriffs need to refuse to obey federal gun laws. He hinted, as he often does, that civil war might result if they fail to do so.

But the scene above took place four years before Monica, in 1994, long before Clinton handed his enemies a scandal on a platter that seemingly made such references acceptable. It was not at a Republican caucus or Christian Coalition meeting, but at a gathering of right-wing "Patriots" who had come to hear about forming militias and common-law courts and defending their gun rights -- indeed, their families -- from the New World Order. They numbered only a hundred or so and only half-filled the little convention hall in Bellevue, Washington, but their fervor saturated the room with its own paranoid energy. And the speaker, who could have passed even then for a local Republican public official -- actually, he was nominally a Democrat -- in fact was one of the nation's leading Patriot figures: Richard Mack, then sheriff of Arizona's mostly rural Graham County. As a leader in the fight against gun control (his lawsuit eventually led to the Supreme Court overturning a section of the so-called Brady Law), Mack was in high demand on the right-wing lecture circuit as he promoted the militia concept to his eager acolytes. He usually sprinkles his "constitutional" gun-rights thesis with his theories on church-state separation -- it's a "myth," he claims -- and "the New World Order conspiracy."

This is one of the leaders of the "movement" with which respectable conservative voices and some Republican politicians allied themselves over the last two weeks. Personally, I think that the reason you didn't hear from any of the prospective "human shields" here is that Mack didn't have the guts to ask them.

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